YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Sheetz

lines on the record: 28
first: 2017-05-22
most recent: 2017-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But they want I think some version of asteroid mining, particularly with regard to that waterfour fuel point that we're making, will exist. Space tourism will be a real thing. The pricing that's being talked about there now is feasible for a decent amount of the Earth's population. I think lastly I would say we're going to see in 20 years time a lot of investors having made really nice returns in a lot of these really early stage markets.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same thing with the moon. There are a lot of plans in place. SpaceX says they will be orbiting tourists around the moon within like 24 months time. Now, many entities in this arena have had timeline slip, but they're saying that. I think there will almost be a race between NASA and the most serious private players with regard to Mars plans and moon plans. Because if you're NASA and a private player starts to get ahead of your timeline, then you have to debate whether or not it's worth you spending that money or”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Manned in terms of exactly who's stepping foot onto the planet is a different question because sometimes they lay out the plans in terms of where they want to literally be standing and sometimes they lay them out in terms of what they want to be orbiting. And also with something that is that far away, the plan and the timeframe will change. But NASA has a multi-tiered plan to go to Mars and they will make a lot of progress on that over the next 20 years.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reality is there's a very wide range of potential outcomes with almost everything we've covered individually. I think first and foremost, NASA is alive and vibrant. But I do think we really just continue to hear more and more about these big, well-capitalized, really serious, really ambitious private players becoming a larger and larger piece of the puzzle. I think we see a lot of rockets landed and reused. I think we take a lot of steps towards Mars. NASA has a plan to be at Mars by 2030, so that's within 20 years.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Air Force spends $15 billion a year on disclosed, not classified, aircraft. So the 30 that's classified, it's not all space, but if you look at things that the Air Force says, a healthy chunk of that is space. So if we say 10 of that is space, you can sort of kind of...”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“years that's absolutely right that's absolutely right i mean similar to what we were discussing nasa specific to space the military sort of has that element to it in a more broader sense including space that's absolutely true but you know it's also just the case that ruggedized communication systems speak to each other through space drones that are flying around collecting data are sending it back via space just a lot of the infrastructure and the assets kind of run through space and so the dod and all the three letter agencies combined have a lot of assets in space and so if you look at just what's spent on that per year decent amount of its classified so it's a little tricky to unearth the data but it looks like about 20 to 25 billion dollars a year spent by dod and the intel world on space that's a big number relative to the defense budget if you look at the air force the air force has a disclosed total classified budget that's about $30 billion the air”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No pun intended. Yeah, no, I actually struggle with that a lot because you say space in reference to a sector where an end market and so it's a tricky one. A lot of what we've discussed thus far is commercial, private, obviously NASA being civil, but a lot of the report is focused on the commercial and the private world because that's where a lot of the rapid innovation is happening and the really long-term outsize investment opportunities lie. But today, as we speak, the military is really one of the larger and more visible and measurable pools of capital available in the space market. The US military has significantly more of its assets in space than people realize.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speaking of money, another place where there has been a lot of investment in spaces in the sort of military side of spaces. And there's been a little bit of writing about the militarization of space. How has space become a core pillar of U.S. strategy? And what role do the big defense contractors that you cover in your day job play in that space? No pun attended.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a pretty diverse set of submarkets that we're seeing private money or VC money look at. Back to how much we discussed the significance of launch, launch is by far the biggest place you're seeing money go. There's been private placements into SpaceX, and there's a lot of other smaller launch operations. One of them, for example, is offering shared payloads where you could literally go onto their website and sign up to have your payload go up on one rocket with other people's payloads. So the shared economy for launch, there's a number of different things in launch. The other big one is in the satellite market, small satellite constellations are a big growth area in the market and are seeing a lot of VC money. And the concept there is lighter weight, easier to manufacture, easier to maintain, less costly if you lose one, more flexible, able to put them in different places to get different coverages, whether for communications or imaging versus a traditional very large”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's something like 75, 80% of all VC activity in space from the last 20 years was in the last three or four. So any of the charts you're looking at are just straight up into the right, and there's been a real concentration of investment activity in the last handful of years compared to the last handful of decades. And so there's something real in here. Something is going on that is bringing real money to the space. And if you believe in follow the money to find the clues, it's coming into this market in a hurry.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We dug deep into that to sort of see what's happening here from an investment perspective. We teamed up with Keith Terry, who I know has been on the pod before, who's our internet analyst in the research division. And his team actually separately has recently come out with a really cool broader look at the venture capital landscape that they're calling venture capital horizons. In the last two full years, there was a little over a billion dollars.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the commercial side, the commercialization space, which is invisible largely. So obviously as space gets privatized, it draws investors in. Some of the investors are just deep pocketed people who are passionate about space. But there's some venture capital money, people looking for real returns into. Having taken a look at this, what trends can you point to where the money's going and how do you see that evolving over time?”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in something like launch the reliability of the guys that have been there for a while versus the new private players is going to keep them very viable in the market for a really long period of time. And also government and military work they're doing keeps coming their way. There's definitely a ton of innovation, a lot happening in the private world, but there is absolutely a place for the old guard. The other point I would make on NASA too is the budget matters. The NASA budget has actually been under considerable pressure for a long time. The NASA budget has declined in real dollars for decades. And it's declined as a percentage of federal outlays like every year for 30 years.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, to me it's really hard to envision a period of time in my lifetime and really well beyond that NASA doesn't exist and is not significantly relevant. NASA obviously has a focus on space, but NASA is also really a research and a science organization. And if you go on the NASA website and look at their discussion of what they'd plan to do next, there's a lot of discussion of going to Mars. There's a lot of discussion of going back to the moon. a lot of discussion of what they want to do with the International Space Station. But there's also a lot of discussion of what they want to do in aerospace and what they want to do with air traffic control and what they want to do with material science and what they want to do with climate change. They're really focused on a lot more than just space. But I think NASA is here to stay in near, deep manned, unmanned space exploration. You kind of need that government partner. And in terms of the old guard, if you will, in terms of the older players, back to that question you asked on the risk.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asset, and so you got to be really careful when you launch it, and it's pretty big and spread out, and so it's a tough launch versus if you just take all the raw materials and pack them really neatly in a concise way. And then you launch that as is into space, you could launch that at a substantially lower cost. It's easier to get through the Earth's atmosphere in the early part of launch while you're doing that, and then you actually build it in space. And that's something that currently has a little bit of funding from NASA and DARPA. Those are two other ones beyond the mining discussion that we covered in the report and that I think are probably more real sooner than mining.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in orbit manufacturing. And so there are multiple private players who have said that they think a lot of the Earth's manufacturing should be done in space for a number of reasons. And now having a lot of heavy manufacturing in space seems hard to do and seems like a ways off, which is probably the case. But there are interim steps to that that are pretty interesting. So there are companies that are working on satellite servicing offerings where everything is done in space. Satellites running out of fuel needs to be refueled. You can actually just refuel it in space and have the service life extended. And there are also companies that actually have funding from NASA, from DARPA, the DoD Research Agency to sort of launch all the raw materials of manufacturing a satellite product into space and then build it while you're in space. And the logic there being if you build a satellite on the ground on Earth, it's very meticulous, intricate process, and you've made an extremely expensive”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a while now, there's been a decent amount of discussion about the space tourism market. The cost for that had been astronomically high for a long time, still quite high, but has come down significantly. And so the sort of major players in that bucket are talking about being able to take everyday citizens into space for, call it, $200,000. Still a very high number, but something that I think we'll see a not insignificant amount of the population look to do. That doesn't really get you that far into space. The discussion is around 100 kilometers above Earth. And so it gets you the feeling of being in space, the weightlessness of space. You look back, you see the image of the Earth, but you're not going to the moon. We think that over the next decade or two becomes more real. Another one that I think can be reasonably real and where there's a couple big players that sound very serious about the size of it much longer term.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The initial idea is actually not, I'm going to go into space and find all these riches and take them back and keep them. The initial idea is actually that you can create little bodies of places to go for things you need while you're in space. So rocket fuel is really water kind of manipulated. That's extremely simplistic, but it's water in its base. And asteroids have a ton of water. And so if you have something in space and you want to take it elsewhere in space and it just needs to be refueled, if you could have something where you're mining that water out of an asteroid and then you can refuel the thing that needs to be refueled without having to bring it all the way back down or without having to send something else up, you can have these sort of little mini gas stations in space that's much more exactly. And there's also an energy angle to it as well that's discussed because the moon has helium-3 and it turns out that helium-3 is a non-radioactive form of nuclear power. And so”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commodity prices fall. Absolutely not our intent to have that view. And in fact, for me, when we first started studying asteroid mining, I thought that can't be. But when you realize how many really serious scientists and really serious investors are absolutely looking at it, then you realize it could be real.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too much, it's not worth it. Let's get into some of the cool stuff exploration. What can we expect now that the costs of getting to space are lower than ever? You mentioned asteroid mining, which is one thing that's caught the public's attention. Are these viable business models?”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get a lot of attention. Yeah, that's right. And so when you're pushing the envelope on the edge of technology and capability, you're more likely to have failures, which is hard to do. And so there's a lot of risk in getting it right, especially something like reusability. There's also risk actually also in just volume and overhead absorption. Like you're trying to do something that's a more expensive process or more expensive technique and you're not getting the repetition out of it if there's not enough customers that want to do it a lot. The model doesn't necessarily work. I think the total volume is a risk and absolutely reliability. Sometimes the payload that you're putting on one of these is so insanely expensive that if there's a 2% chance of failure, it's just too much. It's not worth it.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a ton of risk in something that's this technologically sophisticated. There's failures all the time. There's investors who look at companies that launch and say, I'll follow this company and just wait for the inevitable failure, and then I'll look at investment opportunity after that. It's reasonably common.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it's basically never been done until the past. I mean, it's almost like still never been done. Like basically in the last 18 months, you've had your first ever landings. You've had a few successful landings. A lot of that has just been in testing. And actually in March of this year, SpaceX had the first ever successful relaunch, taking a satellite back up on a rocket that had been used before. Those two companies have been talking about for a while, but it's really brand new in real life in practice and a huge thing to focus on in terms of launch going forward. But yeah, launch has been really the biggest bucket of innovation and a huge critical component of what's going to happen here going forward because it's how you actually get up to this economy.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. Now there's been this wave of those that are well capitalized outside of the government world that have been pushing into here. And whether it's for personal reasons that they have or because they just see the investment opportunity. And so, you know, when you look at the SpaceX's and the blue oranges into the world who are really the big known private players in launch, they are just innovating like crazy and really pushing the envelope. And between what they've done and what others have done cost of materials, cost of manufacturing on a kilogram to low Earth orbit basis prices for launch have come down about 90% over a decade, which is just incredible. So those costs have been coming down. I think they'll continue to come down. Another really big part of that conversation, and it pertains to those two companies I mentioned in the private world, is reusability. It's a huge focus point in terms of what's going on in this industry. And basically that...”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it sounds like a lot of the... If you think about it very simplistically, in order to have activity in space, you have to get to space. And so launch is just super critical. And one could easily imagine that the cost of developing, manufacturing, and actually performing rocket launch into outer space would be pretty expensive. And so a lot of the bigger players here make comments like the cost of admission is too high to play and things like that. And it's true.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's there in the military. Really, a lot of opportunity, a lot of new investors putting a lot of real dollars here. And so ultimately we do think it is a new investment frontier. And then, of course, also a nice play on the famous William Chatner Star Trek opening credits.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, this report is part of a series that our research division did called Profiles and Innovation, which is really a broader effort to look for those bigger picture long-term opportunities across all markets and many of those other reports could be called new investment frontiers. And so with what we knew about space and what we sort of saw was going on outside of our coverage, especially in the private world, we had a feeling that there was a lot of investment opportunity in space. So we really dug in with this effort. And I'd say my single biggest takeaway from doing this is really there's so much more going on here than I would have thought or that I think the average investor realizes. When you look at how much privatization is going on in space, how much is moving into the commercial world, how many really big, interesting tech players are really pushing hard. And also, you know, in the classic government and civil market, the potential for NASA to be reinvigorated, and also just the huge dollar spend.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so the 20 companies we cover, a dozen or so of them, have some space business. But as a percentage of the total business for most companies I cover, space isn't particularly large. So we've always known the space market. We've always looked at the space market. We've studied it. We've done the work on it. But we've never looked at it the way we look at commercial aircraft fundamentals or the defense budget or things more kind of core to that day job that you referenced. But separately, we're always looking for new markets, longer-term investment opportunities, ways to think outside of the box, think bigger picture if we can.”
2017-05-22 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Space: The Next Investment Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT